1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates in general to telecommunication systems, and more particularly, to a method for distributing a telecommunication data base to a plurality of digital telephone system controllers.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Presently known implementations of programmable telephones load the operational and functional software into the instrument itself. The "Intelligent" digital telephone communicated or passed control and operational messages directly to the host system central processor complex. Since modern CO exchanges operate in real time, software processing of such real time requests for operational service from a plurality of "Intelligent" telephone instruments severely impact the operation of the CO exchange.
Further, the control protocol software used by the "smart" telephone instrument for its operation is usually resident in Read Only Memory (ROM) within a processor complex of the telephone instrument. Any operational changes required to be made to the instrument entailed replacement of the ROM.
Telephone instrument specific call processing routines and user defined features for such instruments are normally either contained in the telephone instrument or in a data base located in the central processor complex of the CO system.
It is more advantageous to provide a digital telephone instrument that is basically "less intelligent" that interfaces and communicates to a digital telephone controller resident in the line interface of the CO. In this particular configuration the digital telephone sends requests to the controller, and the controller sends back responses to the digital telephone for controlling its functions. Only those messages required for call processing are transmitted from the controller to the CO central processing complex. All software required in the functional operation of the features of the digital telephone instrument are resident in the controller at the CO site.
Such a system is taught by co-pending U.S. patent applications, Ser. No. 07/615,528 filed on Nov. 19, 1990 titled, "A Digital Phone System, " and Ser. No. 07/615,523 filed on Nov. 19, 1990 titled, "A Message Arrangement And Method For Implementing A Digital Telephone System," both having a common assignee with the present invention.
In the above mentioned system the telephone instrument controller contains the generic operating program for the instrument as well as a data base of user programmed custom features.
The operating program and generic data base for each instrument contains approximately 180K bytes of data. To load this data serially, using the CO systems memory mapping techniques, would require approximately eight minutes of system time to load approximately 256 telephone instruments. This overhead in system time can cause major problems in the normal call processing operation of the CO system. Since each telephone instrument controller contains a 64 Kbps PCM port for transmission of voice and data from the digital telephone instrument to the CO system, it would be advantageous to use the PCM network to broadcast the data to all the controllers in the digital telephone system simultaneously. A single PCM channel could transmit the entire load to all controllers in the example above in approximately 23 seconds.
It therefore becomes the object of the present invention to provide a method for distributing via a PCM channel the operating program data of a digital telephone system, from the CO system to a plurality of digital telephone system controllers.